I love this type of visual representations, that I can use for different purposes.
Minimum viable product
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Category Archives: Product and Solutions
BMC-Remedy Vs ServiceNow
Confusion and lack of data is what I see when I see people talking about what is the best solution for IT Service Desk solution.
In one side we have BMC Remedy the stronger solution of the market and on the other side we have ServiceNow as the emergent solution that is being trendy right now.
We have to separate apples from pears, neither Remedy is died neither ServiceNow is the magic solution that will solve all your troubles.
BMC Remedy,
- BMC has maintained its position as a global leader in the IT service desk/IT service support management market.
- BMC licenses three enterprise-oriented ITSSM products:
- 1.- BMC Remedy ITSM Suite,
- 2.- BMC FootPrints Service Core (licensed perpetually on-premises)
- 3, BMC Remedyforce (licensed in the SaaS model)
- Customers of Remedyforce and FootPrints that desire broader BMC capabilities currently do not have the same integration experience across all products in the BMC ITOM portfolio.
ServiceNow,
- It has grown rapidly by targeting organizations as an IT service desk/ITSSM replacement solution.
- ServiceNow was the first vendor to the ITSSM market with SaaS at scale with initial, ITIL-based incident, problem, change and configuration management automation requirements.
- ServiceNow’s ITOM solutions are sold as additional products primarily aimed at adding value to ITSA by improving the visibility of the infrastructure environment. This is a market difference.
- There is already a good network of developers, administrators, and partners that can build applications over the ServiceNow platform. These extensions to the core solution can be done via certified integrations and partnerships. Take care with the decision to extend the core solution, analyze deeply the investment required and the TCO.
- The license model is clear for simple combinations, when you are combining the requirements and making them complex changes to pricing models have confused prospects and some customers, study this in detail.
- On-premises customers pay the same as SaaS customers, even though they cover the hosting directly but do not benefit from automatic upgrades.
At the time of analyzing your situation I suggest to:
First, what main functionalities do you require? Take a look to this table,
Second, assess the maturity of your organization’s infrastructure and operations. Are you ready to go beyond? or you require a solution to stabilize your operations?
Third, determine readiness for a broader IT operations management tooling strategy,
- Do I want to just cover IT Operations processes? Can I do it?
- Do I want to cover IT Operations processes and extend to other IT processes or business processes? Can I do it?
- Do you already have a BMP solution and it’s working fine?
Lean toward Remedy when a matured operational processes is in place and you want to align IT operations management tooling strategy beyond ITSSM with the support of a tool.
Lean toward ServiceNow when plans and requirements extend broader use of forms and workflow-based applications that support non-IT needs.
Remain open to using both Remedy and ServiceNow as respective mini-suites, an approach taken by many large, complex and mature infrastructure & operational organizations.
Perform a detailed analysis of the licensing approaches for all options to understand the short and longer-term total cost of ownership (TCO) specific to your organization.
Drupal+Acquia, interesting market penetration
Everybody has listened about WordPress and their evolution as Open Source example of their success in the market. For the consumer to consumer market WordPress is the leader in some of the main areas, no doubts.
I would like to write about a different way to use the open source in the market: Drupal & Acquia. Read the evolution of Acquia , they are using Drupal to compete with the corporate WCM solutions and multi-channel e-commerce in the medium/big companies.
Drupal is not trying to compete against WordPress. The mistake I have seen reading articles and talking with people is that they misunderstood the use and capabilities where Drupal can really compete.
Acquia understood it, and they has been able to penetrate in a market composed by standalone solutions with high total cost of ownership (TCO): Adobe, EMC, SharePoint…
They have been evolving through last are shown as leaders in the Gartner Magic quadrant.
Service Mesh, agility platform
I was reading and reading documents about how it works, the value it provides… and got a basic and blurred idea about the whole thing. So I decided to attend a training session related to Service Mesh, and this was a great decision because and now, after this sessions, that add a set of more than 50 real exercises, I can say that I understand how powerful is.
Just a reminder for me: CSC Service Mesh offers to all customers and users of the Agility Platform a set of Agility Platform Tools to create Agility Platform compatible images for a range of operating systems across public and private cloud providers.
ILOG Visualization Products
ILOG was founded in 1987 in France, their core business was enterprise software 
products for supply chain, business rule management, visualization and optimization. Their best in class product was Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS).
In 1997 ILOG acquired CPLEX Optimization Inc.
In 2007 ILOG’s acquired LogicTools. This enabled ILOG to be the owner of a complete line of supply chain applications.
It was acquired by IBM 2009. They re-branded BRMS as IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM). The CPLEX and other tools also had some minor re-branding under the IBM Optimization Suite of tools.
In 2014 IBM sold ILOG Visualization products (JViews and Elixir) to Rogue Wave Software, Inc.
The story will continue…
Attask
I found this SaaS company, and watching their videos, I wanted to dig into more details.
- They are in the “Marketing Resource Management” magic quadrant.
- Clear pricing tables.
- Task management, resource management, capacity management, Gantt charts, agile project management, workflow automation…
- The solution looks for the major productivity at all levels: in the requirement, design, tasks, plan, quality of the delivery, delays… there is an excellent combination of the Six Sigma principles, combined with SDLC and productivity best practices.
- Look at the list of companies using it.
- Magic quadrant: Cloud-Based IT Project and Portfolio Management Services: leaders.
ArchiMate Modelling Tool
Other open source solution: Archimate, a modelling tool to create ArchiMate models and sketches.
I’ll keep this link, by the moment it’s not a popular tool.
AspenTech MES
I did not know that AspenTech have their own MES: aspenONE Manufacturing Execution Systems.
The basis of all these solutions is Web.21, a web-based solution for managing the processes and data from an InfoPlus.21 database. It is now an integrated Microsoft-based platform.
Sales and product life-cycle
Today I was reading a huge amount of documentation related to business processes and I had some time to organize some ideas, so I tried to draw it to clarify myself getting some ideas from some pictures I have seen.
They can be wrong, please correct me I need to learn!
SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII)
I have to gain some basic knowledge on SAP MII. To do it I was reviewing some basic information and looking for some business scenarios that help me to understand the whole thing.
To understand the solution, just attend to the name: MII.
Manufacturing, nothing to say here,
Integration, it basically tries to integrate the shop-floor systems and business operations, offering the data and the relevant information to the different stakeholders (operators, plant managers…). All in real time.
Intelligence, this basically attends to the idea of offering the necessary business logic that automate as much as possible, and offer the required real time reports to all stakeholders.
The picture before SAP MII could be something like 3 components: ERP (POs, materil inventory, BoM, planned orders,…), MES (production confirmation, quality notifications, material transfers) and Shop-floor (material receipts, materials comsumptions…).
Once, SAP MII is on scene, we can organize the processes from front-end point of view, we can integrate shop-floor through interfaces, automate some of the processes through a graphical environment that really speed-up the integration process, and finally define the information to be shown to the different stakeholders.
SAP MII is a composite application platform composed by:
- a portal that enables real time data to each type of user, using PC, browser or mobile device.
- a data layer, with specific connectors (I would say that this seems to be very similar to SAP PI) with connectors. I would expect that the standard connectors really cover the industry shop-floor environments, the manufacturing industry is famous by having old dinosaurs on their IT.
- SAP PCo (Plant connectivity), something I need to investigate in deep.
- Business logic, where you can define the transactions you want to put in place.
